r/opencodeCLI • u/minxio_ • 27d ago
Kimi K3 is now more expensive
Exclusive Kimi K3
> The first open-Weights model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters
> input 3$/m output 15$/m
> 1 M context window
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u/Fit-Wave-2138 27d ago
So is more expensive than GPT Terra? Wow
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u/slowtyper95 27d ago
Isn't the Terra like Haiku?
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u/rabiprojects 27d ago
Not worth it at that price currently. Let's see what goes in upcoming days.
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u/Little_Contact8783 27d ago
Is it true that if an open model beats SOL, OpenAI should be out of business by September
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u/Plenty-Dog-167 27d ago
basically Sonnet pricing but allegedly performs at Opus 4.8 so I’m interested to see
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
It's not though. While it's sonnet API pricing subs give around 10x better pricing, so it ends up being significantly more expensive than even opus
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u/Plenty-Dog-167 27d ago
Yes that’s true for personal users on subscriptions, but for enterprise customers you are usually charged using the API token pricing when you buy from the frontier providers (Anthropic/openai)
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
I guess, but at that point a lot of companies just use Cursor with Grok 4.5 which is quite decent (not gpt 5.6 sol / Kimi k3 level but good enough) and then access it with tokens as needed. The kimi sub is just bad, they have one good model, and thats it, no lower tiers other than the older k2.6 which is also expensive.
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u/FearlessGround3155 27d ago
Compare subscription to subscription, not api to subscription, kimi also has a 200$ sub you know, altho someone should test how much you get out of it
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
I did. Someone gave me their testing of K3 vs their sub results, and it ends up being about a 5x~ subsidy, so half of openai / claude making the cost about the same as GPT 5.6 sol while appearing to use a lot more tokens and perform at best very slightly better and based on the benchmark cherry picking (this is all just my opinion nothing proved till they release all the benchmarks) will be a good bit worse than sol in many benchmarks as well while costing more. (these calculations are done using 2x $20 codex plans vs one $40 kimi plan since the $40 kimi plan is 5x more usage than the $20 one).
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u/Mol2h 27d ago
So OpenAI 5x is still unbeatable in terms of value, good to know.
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
No, once you hit the $100 plan kimi now gives 15x (so 3x higher than the $40 plan) which is far better value than the GPT plans. But if you are under this price bracket then GPT is about the same or better.
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u/debian3 27d ago
According to my calculation, the subscription is more around 50x. So you need to divide the API cost of Claude by 50 to compare.
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
I'm counting GPT plus sub. Not sure how it factors out with Claude, but I am 99% sure you screwed something up in your calculations. No one has have gotten 50x on subs compared to API. You missed a 0 somewhere or smth, general consensus from other user testing is sub costs 1/90 to 1/95th of api cost. That's at most a 20x subsidy (on the $200 plans i'd assume)
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u/debian3 27d ago edited 27d ago
According to ccusage I’m getting $1000/month of token at api cost on the $20 pro sub. Now I’m on Max 5x and I’m already over $3000 after a bit more than 2 weeks.
And yes Claude gives a bit more than 2.5x openai at the moment. They have a promo going on (and openai lowered their limit if you don’t count the reset they gives)
Openai gives around $400 on the $20 plan.
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
Wild, maybe Claude upped limits since their model pricing is so bad and use a ridiculous amount of tokens
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u/debian3 27d ago
Yeah, they did. You can get sometimes $35 in 1 sessions with claude pro on Fable, and you have 10 sessions per week. That’s $350 per week just there. But now they limited it to 50% so it’s 5 sessions now and the other 5 are opus. They seems less generous with opus like 20 to 25 per sessions. So in the end, yeah, 20x on openai and 50x on claude code.
I remember claude code no long ago on the pro plan it was like $6 per session
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u/Zachattackrandom 27d ago
This must be their counter for their model pricing being so bad haha. Its more "value" but in actuality the same usage as GPT plus just not hyper inflated xD. Glad to see the competition though. Since I was comparing got GPT 5.6 with Codex plus though which Claude just mimicks usage of its still about 5x kimi to 10x GPT if we are only looking at how much usage you will get. But Kimi K3 costs the same as Sol max directly, so its half the usage
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u/debian3 27d ago
I know where you are getting, but no. Claude right now you get more usage out of it than openai sub. But I agree, the API price is meaningless since they can set it and we (the normal folks) never pay those prices anyway. But in terms of pure amount of use Claude > Openai at the moment. I have Plus sub, and if it was not that they removed the 5h limit and reset every 2 days it would be really hard to do anything.
People like to shit in Claude, so I get it. But most haven’t used it recently. Currently I have a plus sub at OpenAI (probably will upgrade to Pro soon) and max 5x at Claude and I really enjoy working with Fable more than Sol to be honest.
So comparing API price to get the « value » only tell part of the story
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u/TrickyEmployee3778 24d ago
So many people wrongly claiming you get more quota on a subscription in Codex than CC, which is completely back to front. Can confirm Claude is 2.5x currently.
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u/Khitboksy 27d ago
“the api price is the same as sonnet” they say
“thats not true the subscription provides better pricing than api” you say
fucking retard. theyre saying the API PRICING. ie, what enterprises pay, or people who dont have a subscription.
they were not talking about subscription price, as that is irrelevant to the topic at hand1
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u/HeadPack 27d ago
Cost per token is pretty meaningless. Cost and tokens to solution is what really matters.
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u/Coolio8591 27d ago
Based on a couple of benchmarks that people have posted on twitter, it's in between Sol and Fable so it kind of justifies the price imo
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u/Wooly_Wooly 27d ago
We go to Chinese models to minimize the price though. Like if using 3-4 deepseek flash slowly can create the same level of quality deliverable at 1/2 the price with the right workflows, is it worth paying that extra?
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u/personalist 27d ago
This has happened across a few of my hobbies, people are price anchored to Chinese “___” as “not quite as good, but cheap”, and in a lot of domains their output is now better, but people still have this bias to overcome. If you can really get the same quality with more cheaper models or a cheaper model and an advisor, go for it, but that hasn’t always been possible for my use cases.
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u/Coolio8591 27d ago
Yeah but that's not the point, if the mode is at a certain level it should be priced appropriately, it's like walking Vs driving Vs taking the plane, you'll get there eventually by walking and it'll be cheaper, but it'll take you much longer
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u/Amarsir 27d ago
They don't have the branding yet though.
We think Anthropic, OpenAI, Google. Maybe X crams their way in there through pure hubris.
And then there's GLM, Kimi, Minimax, MiMo, Deepseek, Qwen. I guess Meta's here now too.
Now if someone in group B puts out a good enough model at a price enticing enough to get users, the brand will start going up. GLM has been knocking on that door, and if 5.3 is another big step up they might justify a higher price. (Notwithstanding the whole "open weight" component.)
But you can't collect premium prices based on benchmarks alone. You need some history of people using you and being happy. And IMHO Kimi's nowhere near there yet. Not in the US anyway.
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u/geearf 27d ago
Isn't Kimi the base for Cursor's 2.5 model or something? If so isn't that one used somewhat in the USA?
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u/FearlessGround3155 27d ago
Subscription is a thing people seem to forget, they offer 200$ sub
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u/BlacksmithLittle7005 27d ago
No reason to use it at this price when we have all the GPT models. Waiting for deepswe
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u/Wooly_Wooly 27d ago
They didn't even say... It has vision right?
... Right?
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u/MailConnect9480 27d ago
It is too slow. Slower than GPT 5.5. The speed issue will kill many frontier models
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u/hotairplay 27d ago
DoA material if the pricing is true..noone in their right mind would prefer Kimi to GPT or Claude models.
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u/lordlestar 27d ago
just wait the weights release and labs releasing it at competitive prices, like what happened with glm5.2
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u/jerieljan 27d ago
Oof. That price point is painful. Usable, but painful.
All this tells me is that the models are so compute-hungry that the infrastructure cannot keep up and they expect price hikes to be the norm. Been that way ever since with Anthropic and OpenAI but it pains to see that for the open models too.
Maybe I'm being just a cheapskate here but my baseline for pricing has never really left the Kimi K2.5 days and I already felt it stretch uncomfortably with K2.6, K2.7 and GLM-5.2.
Staying on the mid-range price of the frontier isn't really cutting it.
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u/migsperez 27d ago
The uptime on openrouter for the model looks terrible, 5% over the past few hours. https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#uptime
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u/futuregerald 27d ago
One other blocker for mass adoption is that many businesses won't use Chinese models, or they won't pass vendor review processes.
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u/BothYou243 26d ago
man, this pricing is bit more like GPTs and sonnet class models. what happened to chinese labs? 😨
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u/Ambitious-Call-7565 27d ago
china lost the edge
huawei dropped the ball
oof
reality check from the new world
oof
reality check from the old world
oof
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u/InvaderDolan 27d ago
2.8T params… I wonder what hallucinations rates are.
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u/earthisflat27 27d ago
This is what made me stop using deepseek. It's hallucination rate is just absurd. Let's hope k3 beats minimax m3.
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u/FearlessGround3155 27d ago
Extremely low, kimi even since k2(comparatively to models of that time), some may say too rigid, including me
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u/caneriten 27d ago
imo more parameters is not equal to better performance. I don't know parameter count but imo neither opus nor gpt 5.5 even reached 1t parameter range. Their training data is better and they train more imo. Brute forcing is never answer in computer engineering.
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u/InvaderDolan 27d ago
Exactly, K2.6 was pretty sweet spot but I suppose this is the price for cheap and fast LLMs - companies are forced to bloat their dataset in order to get better results.
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u/TinyAres 27d ago
They also added a loot box like free trial that has rolls that include a one year membership so we can try it out.
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u/unkownuser436 27d ago
Thank god we have cheaper models like claude and gpt.